Chinatown: The Last Great Film Noir

An appreciation, on the occasion of its forty-year anniversary

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America has produced two truly indigenous art forms: jazz and film noir. Even the greatest of the great American novels were all ultimately derivative of superior European predecessors. The best rock 'n' roll bands were all British. Even the great American gangster movies — The Godfather, Once Upon a Time in America, Goodfellas — were the product of directors who worshipped the gods of Italian neorealism. The western was a reconstitution of the traditional epic, also borrowed from the Old World. But jazz and film noir could have been born nowhere else. They live nowhere else. They are American even when the French do them. And therefore they occupy a special national prominence. Despite their twin birth, jazz and film noir are in many ways opposites. Jazz is Dionysian, a furious explosion of soulful expression embodied in the act of improvisation. Film noir is Apollonian, a perfectly calibrated series of images and plot structures.

When, or indeed if, jazz died is a subject of some debate. But film noir has a definite end point: the release of Chinatown, forty years ago today. Chinatown was the last great film noir made in the classical style. Roman Polanski directed it right after his soul had been appropriately steeped in murder, and in it Jack Nicholson gives one of his quietest and best performances. In a sense, film noir could go no further than Chinatown. Polanksi figured out and then perfected the two basic underlying plots of all film noirs: All is not what it seems with a woman, and behind every great fortune is a great crime. The brilliance of Chinatown was in taking those two elements to their extreme edge. The mysterious woman in question turns out to be the victim of incest: Her sister is her daughter. The film's bad guy, Noah Cross, played by John Huston, is starving his city of water so that he can own it.

The movie is set in 1937 Los Angeles. L.A. had always been the backdrop for the great film noirs of the forties and fifties, like Double Indemnity. The original directors chose California as a setting because they were making cheap thrillers and because at the time it gleamed with that amazing American innocence, the prospect of ever expanding prosperity, which could so happily be falsified. It was easy, even then, to see the phoniness behind the immaculate parkways and orange groves. Polanski took the idea further. He made the phoniness of Los Angeles, a town of dreams built on the desert, the subject of the plot itself — a decision that can only be called genius.

The afterlife of the film noir, which has been extensive, took that insight as its beginning. All the post–film noir imitations have been about the meaning of Los Angeles itself. L.A. Confidential was basically a remake of Chinatown, a world-weary, and wearying, meditation on the corruption involved in living in big cities. It shows celebrity as literally a form of elaborate whoredom, which is about as original a concept as Cheese Whiz. L.A. Confidential tried to out-ChinatownChinatown, and of course it failed. Nothing is more taboo than incest, and there can be no greater prize than ownership of the City of Angels itself.

By contrast, Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (which marks its twentieth anniversary this year) was meta-Chinatown and vastly more successful. Everybody in the movie was aware of being in a film noir — that was its gift. And the lives of the characters were also entirely L.A. The gangsters act like "gangsters." The hillbillies do what hillbillies do in the movies: sodomize strangers. Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) makes the monumental decision to "walk the earth" like Kane in Kung Fu. A key scene takes place in Jack Rabbit Slim's, a restaurant where the waiters play characters from Hollywood, but the joke is on everybody else: Who isn't playing a character? Tarantino transcended the film noir genre in Pulp Fiction — as he was transcending all other genres as well — but film noir was its core. That was the basis on which every joke was played (hence the title). The only way he could do it was by creating something entirely different from a proper film noir. Maybe his greatest achievement is that he didn't imitate Chinatown.

Film noir has obviously had an amazing posthumous existence. Filmmakers keep returning to the form, although it remains always as a kind of citation. If you're aware you're making a "film noir," you aren't making one anymore — you're making an art-house movie that uses elements of film noir, or you're making a parody of a film noir, or you're making a black-and-white thriller. (The original directors of film noirs did not know they were making them; they just thought they were making thrillers. The title was applied later on, by French cinephiles.) Even if the genre has been ended, however, its power will never go away. Film noir was the first mirror in which America took a good long look at itself and wondered if it liked what it saw. It hasn't stopped wondering since.